NEW YORK (TIP): Noted Indian American author Salman Rushdie has received the first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award, presented by the Vaclav Havel Center in New York.
Rushdie made a rare public appearance since he was stabbed and attacked at a literary event last year to receive the award on Nov 14. The prize was kept secret until minutes before he rose from his seat to accept it. A crowd of about 150 guests, consisting of journalists, diplomats, artists and more were in attendance.
“I apologize for being a mystery guest,” Rushdie said after being introduced by “Reading Lolita in Tehran” author Azar Nafisi. “I don’t feel at all mysterious. But it made life a little simpler.”
The Václav Havel Center said the author “exemplifies everything that the award stands for. His forthright defense of freedom of expression emerges not only through his fiction, but also in the principled stances he takes in his trenchant commentaries and memoirs.”
Rushdie has written more than a dozen novels, including Midnight’s Children about India’s partition after British colonial rule in the style of preserving history with fictional accounts. The Havel center, founded in 2012 as the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, is named for the Czech playwright and dissident who became the last president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Communist regime in the late 1980s.
Rushdie, 76, noted that last month he had received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and now was getting a prize for disturbing the peace, leaving him wondering which side of “the fence” he was on.
Rushdie praised Havel, a close friend whom he remembered as being among the first government leaders to defend him after the novelist was driven into hiding by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 decree calling for his death over the alleged blasphemy of “The Satanic Verses.” Rushdie said Havel was “kind of a hero of mine” who was “able to be an artist at the same time as being an activist.” “He was inspirational to me as for many, many writers, and to receive an award in his name is a great honor,” Rushdie added.